Owen Mahoney, the former CEO of South Korean game publisher and developer Nexon (“Counter-Strike,” “ARC Raiders”), says that the AAA gaming sector has reached its ‘end of days’.
In an interview with The Game Business, he says costs are skyrocketing, development cycles are slowing, and publishers are becoming increasingly risk-averse.
He also says the industry often misunderstands where value truly comes from – the people on the game development teams, not the companies themselves. When given examples of failed studios, he says:
“The examples that you just gave were, ‘We bought this company because five years ago they made some game. So, therefore they’re good.’ It doesn’t work that way at all… game companies are really just collections of people.
I think that the AAA industry is structurally at its end. And without a serious rewrite of the ways we go about making games, it’s going to end in more disaster than it has already… [Game makers] get this sort of Sophie’s Choice. They can either build something as an indie without much experience or go work in a factory, which is essentially what working for those big AAA developers looks like. It’s a terrible choice.
And then you go work in a factory and work on one tiny piece of a game, and it’s not fun. Structurally the industry is in really bad shape. We’re sort of at the end-of-days.”
That doesn’t mean he thinks gaming will die, in fact he says due to AI being so integrated already into gaming development that the “industry will probably triple in the next five to seven years” as smaller teams can be empowered, while the audience will reject slop and bad product and only demand good product.
